I came in making choices about how I deploy aesthetics and imagery strategically. It seems to me that's the only legitimate way of making work.

Black painters have done all kinds of work. It's the treatment of forms they engage in-that's what determines the value of the work, not whether you call them a black artist or not.

I think the museum should be an arena in which ideals can hash it out, fight it out, tooth and nail, for attention.

No one has a right to occupy the privileged position all the time, so it should be contested. It should always be messy in there.

Like a lot of young people who wanted to be artists, comics were a gateway for me.

Comics were a place where captivating images lit your imagination and showed you that you can create new kinds of people and worlds.

In some places you can find an extreme blackness used as a descriptive. I also take into account historical realities that some of this range in color is the legacy of white supremacy.

The appearance is the allusion of abstraction when in fact I am in control of every aspect of that symmetry.

I want people to understand that this is a very calibrated image [Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self ], where point by point, very little is left to chance.

Abstraction and representation are supposed to be going down two very different paths, one sociological and the other aesthetic.

I really just want to be an inspiration. I'm a regular guy, that had a dream, that came from a small town, that wanted to play guitar and just liked playing. I want to encourage people.

For the first few months I went round in a linguistic fog. Often I only realized what someone had said minutes or even days or weeks afterwards.

The food in the South is as important as food anywhere because it defines a person's culture.

Sadness diminishes a man's powers

True virtue is life under the direction of reason.

If popular culture has taught us anything, it is that someday mankind must face and destroy the growing robot menace.

Man, however, is the most courageous animal: thereby has he overcome every animal. With sound of triumph has he overcome every pain; human pain, however, is the sorest pain.

If we were to hit the level that Metallica or somebody like that hit, we'd have had a hard time dealing with it. I think it would have been our doom. It's hard for anybody at that level.

Affaires meant 'business.' How like the French to kill two birds with one stone.

Solitude is unquenched ego.

The Moon and Pleiades have set, / Midnight is nigh, / The time is passing, passing, yet / Alone I lie.